I
am an unreconstructed New York Yankee, born in Manhattan, who has
spent more of my adult life in Virginia than anywhere else.
When teaching American history classes at Northern Virginia Community College
at Alexandria I had my students at the beginning of each course
write a brief biographical sketch of themselves as an entry into the
study of the past, believing that when students begin to think that
history has affected their lives and their families' lives, it will
become more interesting to them. I provided them with the following
sample of my own:

I
was born in New York City in 1936 and grew up in Pleasantville in
Westchester County, a New York suburb much like Fairfax County, Virginia.
The first Sage to settle in America, David, came from Wales to Middletown,
Connecticut, in 1652 and died there in 1703. His grave, somewhat
run down when I last saw it, is in the Riverside Cemetery in Middletown.
The name Sage is Scandinavian in origin (it means “historian”
or “storyteller”) and it is believed that the first Sages
arrived in England via the Norman conquest and settled in Wales.
Those who remained in France became LeSage. Over 90% of all
the Sages in the United States are descended from David Sage, and
many had Hebrew names. (My middle name, Judson, means “Son
of Judah.”) Isaac Sage married Sally Childs, daughter
of Major Jonathan Childs and Deliverance Freeman. Major Childs
probably fought in the American Revolution at Saratoga; the family
may have been the one for whom Freeman's Farm, site of the battle
in 1777, was named. Before the War of 1812 one Sage, a sailor,
jumped over the side of a British man-o-war and swam ashore after
being impressed into the Royal Navy.

Among
my ancestors on my father's side are also a number of Germans named
Hinkle (also spelled Henkel) from Cincinnati and a glass maker named
Henry Clay Fry from Rochester, Pa. His ancestors were no doubt Whigs,
which may explain part, but not all, of my political heritage.
My grandfather, Henry Judson, for whom I am named, graduated from
Yale in 1889 and MIT in 1892. He worked for various electric
corporations in Boston, Chicago, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. I
have a sense that his life was very unstable. He married Clara
Belle Fry, daughter of Henry Clay Fry. In 1932, managing his
own electric investment company in New York and struggling unsuccessfully
to survive the Great Depression, my grandfather sent his ”last
dollar” (which I still have) to his wife, along with a brief
note that said, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world,”
and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. His death, not surprisingly,
was profoundly shocking to my grandmother; even her handwriting changed
after he died. His body was recovered six months later and had
to be identified by my father, a gruesome task which he accomplished
mostly by being able to recognize the remnants of clothing.
About my grandfather.

My
father suffered from various illnesses as a boy and did not finish
high school until he was 21. His college class at Yale
was 1918, but they were graduated a year early in order
to serve in World War I in France. He had four children by his
first wife, one of whom, Donald, was a bombardier in World War II; he was killed
in Asia in 1944. My father's first wife was the granddaughter
of Pennsylvania Senator Matthew Quay. My father also served
in World War II in Washington, DC, being too old (50) for combat at
his rank. He worked for the OSS during the war and stayed with
the agency when it later became the CIA. He retired in 1962
and moved with his third wife, Rene, to Tucson, Arizona, where he
died in 1965. He had two children with my mother. My sister,
a Lutheran minister, lives in Oklahoma. Rene Sage Carey, to
whom I grew close after my mother's death, moved from Tucson to be
near us here in Virginia and had two good years with our family. She
died in November 2001 at age 96.

My
mother's family is all IrishKearnys, Corcorans, Sheas, McGuigans
and Coles. My grandfather, Timothy Hoctor, was a stonemason
in Hoosick Falls, New York. His grandparents, Timothy Hoctor
and Elizabeth Baker, came from Ireland in the 1840s during the potato
famine. A cousin of mine, Harriet Hoctor Groeschel, has visited
Ireland and tracked down many of our distant Hoctor relatives.
My other great grandfather, John Kearny, lived in upstate New York
and fought in the Civil War in the 26th New York regiment. I
have a copy of his discharge, issued in Utica in 1863. He is
the only ancestor I know of who fought in the Civil War.

My
mother graduated from Barnard College in New York in 1921, the first
member of her family to go to college. She was managing a book
store in New York City when she met my fatherwhile he was still
married to his first wife. She later worked for the Reader's
Digest as a correspondent. My parents were divorced after World
War II, and my mother died from the side-effects of alcoholism in
1963 shortly after President Kennedy's assassination. She was
passionately interested in politics, and I believe the shock of his
death hastened her demise. My mother's family were staunch Democrats,
my father's family all Republicans. My mother's sister was the dancer,
Harriet Hoctor.

I
finished high school in 1954, went off to college and did poorly.
I quit and joined the Marines to “find myself” and got
an enlisted appointment to the Naval Academy and earned an engineering
degree and a commission as a Marine lieutenant in 1962. During
my 24-year Marine Corps career I commanded artillery batteries in
Vietnam and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, attended several schools, studied
in Heidelberg, Germany (where my daughter was born), had five years
of instructor duty and five years as an aide and speech-writer, and
got my Master of Arts degree in History in 1974 at Clark University
in Massachusetts while on the Navy ROTC staff at Holy Cross.
I also taught part time at Cameron Junior College in Oklahoma and
for the University of Maryland in Japan.

My wife, a retired Fairfax County 6th-grade teacher, is the former Nancy Barnhart
from Pittsburgh.
We have been married over 50 years and have three children.
Our daughter, Jennifer, attended William and Mary and is married
to an attorney and lives in Alexandria. She is
a full-time mother of four. She had our first grandchild, Graham, in January
1996 and our second, a daughter, Meredith, in October 1997. Her
third, Lindsay, was born in November, 2003. A second son, Garrett, was born in 2006. Our two sons went to
Virginia Tech. Jay
lives in Blacksburg, Viriginia and has two daughters, Sloane and Scarlett, who live in
Florida with their mother. Jay is a financial consultant.
Scott is an e-commerce independent contractor who works out of Houston,
Texas.
He was married in 1997 and through him we inherited another
grandson, Judson. Scott's wife,
Helen, had another son in April, 2001, Aidan Lyle Sage. He is the
first Sage
grandson. Their daughter, Alexa, was born in April 2003.

After
retiring from the Marine Corps in 1981 I attended the University of
Maryland, got an MA in English, and taught English four years each
at Maryland and George Mason U between 1982 and 1990. I was hired as a
history lecturer by NVCC in 1983, taught English and history for NVCC
at Alexandria and Annandale and was hired as a full-time historian
in 1990. After retiring from teaching in 2013 I went back to writing full time. To date I have published 11 novels and two American history texts. My novels can be found on my web site at hjsagebooks.com. They are available on Amazon (Kindle) and at Lulu Books.